Simply Won't Boot

[PhilM]

I've hooked up my brand new RP to an HDMI TV, plugged in an SD card with Raspbian, and switched on. The Power light comes on orange. I get the rainbow splash screen, then a blank screen, then a screen full of text scrolling up too fast to read... Then the spash screen, and the process starts again, repeating indefinitely.

Tried again with a card with RaspBMC. Same result. Disconnect the ethernet cable and the wireless keyboard/touchpad dongle. Same result.

Drawing a blank here. How do I get this thing to boot?
--
PJM

[PhilM]

(Oh yeah - tried two different power supplies, too. The orange light is on, solidly, in all cases.)

[pluggy]

Power supplies.

The Pi is tetchy about power and you haven't said much about them. Measuring the voltage across TP 1 and TP2 is a start but isn't a definitive answer.

[PhilM]

Yes, it turned out to be the power supply - or rather, strictly speaking, the power cable.

I'm using a generic Maplins mains/USB charger-adaptor (and I also tried an Apple charger), linked through a perfectly functional mobile 'phone USB/Micro-USB connector cable. That gave me the problem described. This morning, the generic cable I'd ordered from Amazon arrived, I plugged that in, and it all booted first time.

Sigh. Wacky computer problem symptoms.

Now I've just got to wonder what sort of keyboard I should've told it my Perixx cordless keyboard was...

Thanks,

--
Phil